Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Actually, it is something between prose and poetry that Nabokov has used-he has retained Pushkin's iambic tetrameter-and the result is a recognizable and respectable cousinship. To a Russian raised on the original poem, Nabokov's version naturally lacks the music, but retains much of the rhythm, and at least does not (as do the often jingly previous translations) mock Pushkin's music by the clumsiness of its imitation. The sense is as nearly exact as translation permits...
Horned or Cornute. Nabokov's own enormous word skill gives the translation felicity. But his very range of language allows him to choose words which, although exact in meaning, do not give the flavor of the original, generally because they are too highflown or arcane. The simple Russian word for "horned" (Ch. 6, XXXIX) becomes "cornute," which means horned but is not a simple English word. Simple words for "sweetness" and "youth" become "dulcitude" and "juventude" in English (Nabokov excuses himself somewhat abashedly by pointing out that the sense of the couplet-a sneer at moon-June versifying-requires...
...must be said that this rare suppression of the Nabokov literary personality is limited to the translation itself, and that the translation occupies only part of one volume of a four-volume work. Most of the remainder is a vast, outrageous, scholarly, funny, instructive and wholly characteristic mass of notes, offering 1) an exhaustive, line-by-line commentary on the text, variants of the text, and the difficulties of translation; 2) an exhaustive, line-by-line digression from this commentary, of which an elegant three-page defense of pedantry is typical; 3) a complete course in Russian and English prosody...
...couple of years," he declares in a sweeping judgment on the recent works of such eminent names as Katherine Anne Porter, Mary McCarthy, Bernard Malamud and James Baldwin. "There are various ways to declare the death of the novel: to mock it while seeming to emulate it, like Nabokov or John Barth ... or to explode it, like William Burroughs, to leave only twisted fragments of experience and the miasma of death...
...Viadimir Nabokov will read excerpts from a new novel and from previous works, including Lolita and invitation to a Beheading, in Sanders Theatre tonight at 8 p.m. Tickets are on sale at the Coop and at the door...